Mark's Blog

It’s a year to the day since I launched this blog, by far the longest blog I’ve ever had running which is quite an achievement . Some 120 posts later and we’re still going, although it is currently not getting updated as frequently as I’d like.

Happy first birthday and I hope to continue sharing my thoughts and the occasional rant and ramble for many years to come .

One for those of you in the UK that watch The Apprentice here in terms of Siralun being rather misrepresented. Quite funny though .

If you are reading this in an feed aggregator and can’t see the above video click here. Enjoy and full props to Cassetteboy who deserves a shout out for some excellent work with this.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or living in another country, in which case I’m sure you have your own privacy battles to face ) you’ll realise that Phorm is well on its way to launching properly in the UK. Now, putting aside if it is legal or not (it isn’t, by the way, and the EU seem to have realised this as well – BBC & El Reg) we need to all come together and take steps to put this beast out of business permanently.

So, if you are currently with an ISP that is thinking about Phorm inform them in the strongest possible terms of your viewpoint. If they continue with the roll-out then switch supplier to somebody who isn’t going to snoop on your browsing habits.

I’ve also taken steps to get this site removed so that the crawlers are no longer able to visit and use this site’s data to send targeted ads to you. I’ve done this by emailing website-exclusion@webwise.com stating that I wish to remove this domain from their systems. One fully hopes that they comply with this request, and I’ll have no hesitation in taking more formal proceedings against them if they don’t. I’ll also be posting the full transcripts of both my email and the response(s) that I receive on my writings page, so check there for updates.

Thus, if you currently operate a site I would request that you email the above address detailing all your domains and requesting that you don’t wish to be a part of their system. If you want more information on Phorm, there is plenty available online and elsewhere, I’m sure.

James Cridland makes an interesting point about Britain and her websites:

“Websites were invented by a Brit: that nice Tim Berners-Lee. And British people are continually innovating – from the clever crowd at moo.com, gigulate.com and dopplr.com, to the world’s biggest broadcaster, or the world’s best newspaper. Our little island is continually punching above its weight when it comes to the web. And we should be proud of that.“

He encourages British sites to display a flag in a display of patriotism, and I for one am happy to oblige seeing as this is a British site on a British server. Thus, if you scroll down to the bottom of this and every page on the site you’ll see a “Made in Britain” tag. Yay for a bit of patriotism .

Photo courtesy of James as well, thanks!

It’s the obligatory time where I shake hands with the WordPress install here and pass some tender loving care its way via the means of an upgrade!

WordPress 2.7.1 has been released so if you have a blog take my initiative and get upgradin’ .

Of course, goes without saying but if you do notice any quirks do let me know via the contact form .

I’m a very Web 2.0 person now that I use really exciting sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as employing the use of a tag cloud on this very blog! . Therefore, in order to give you, the illustrious reader, a weekly digest of my brain explosions that I’ve managed to cram (in less than 140 characters obviously ) onto Twitter there will be a weekly digest of all my statuses appearing on the blog in the form of a post.

If you want the insider track you can take a look at the sidebar of the blog which lists the last 5 statuses or just go visit the Twitter site.

Expect this on a Sunday evening to clear the log before the next week begins!

As some of you may be aware, my grand tours of Cuba in 2007 and Egypt in 2008 brought many interesting photos back to Blighty which are located on my Flickr account.

So, as a part of the stream of updates I will be selecting various photos to display on the blog. These are the best of the bunch so you can look at the best ones without spending hours trawling through and finding them yourself . Randomly selected photos will be along the sidebar, however you can also view them all by viewing the photoblog tag .

If you have seen a photo that you think should be featured then why not let me know and it might just happen .

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening to you all,

After many months of staring at a blank page with some exciting stickmen dancing in a rather repetitive fashion you have a new blog to read!

I am going to attempt to keep updates on this to a semi-regular basis, however mundane or uninteresting my life currently is at that particular point . In the meantime, I ask of you a favour. If you are aware of anyone who is using the old RSS feed please direct them to the new location at http://blog.markbarnes.org/feed/.

In the meantime between now and whenever the first “real” post will arrive I hope you will stick around so that we are able to share our thoughts and expressions together .